I think today marks the 187th birthday of Leo Tolstoy- and the extract below describes the first encounter between Anna Karenin and Vronsky in Part One Chapter 18 of Anna Karenina. The description captures the moment of love’s ignition and the reader joins with Vronsky in stepping aside to admire this most compelling of perhaps all heroines. For who could resist the combination of ‘suppressed eagerness” with her nature ‘brimming over with something”-Surely it is the indefinable, intellectual and erotic energy of Anna’s ‘something’ which though ‘shrouded’ ultimately proves fatally irresistible ?
Gorgeous.
I can remember reading Anna Karenina for the first time at Liverpool University and thinking Anna doomed to enjoy only the most mediocre of romances with Vronsky, who proves too ordinary for her defiant yet compromised soul. Vronsky appreciates Anna’s power but is unable to match it or even truly meet it. Her husband Karenina is sexually repressed and cold though undeniably loves Anna. The tragedy is that only Levin could have balanced her and he in turn is compromised by marriage to the resoundnigly dull( though acceptably orthodox) Kitty. The twentieth century could have saved Anna ; the nineteenth consumed her heart and soul.
Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting out.
With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.
